On Not Being Able to Tie a Bowtie (Sunday Meditation #38)

Field notes, April 4th, 2014 at around 6:30 PM. Department store blues.

It was a jacket for which I was searching, not a blow to the heart. Then again, it was a department store and they are supposed to have everything you need along with a lot for which you have no use. Who knew that a bowtie could hurt so much, cut so deep.

The table was strewn with brightly colored swatches of fabric that glowed like jewels and cut like diamonds. Bowties! I have little to do with regular neckties, much less with old fashioned (yet cool) neckwear that requires a different approach to tie right and wear well.

That I do not know how to properly tie a bowtie was much less upsetting than the realization that followed: the chances that I will teach my legacy how to tie a bowtie are slim to none. It is true that I have a daughter, and it is not outside the realm of possibilities that someday she will want or need to know how to tie such a thing. Yes, my head gets it.

But. There are always conditions to most things in life. The condition in this case of an accidental encounter with bowties is that I will not teach my son how to tie them. It is a ritual I most likely will not experience, this handing down of traditionally masculine knowledge and experience. 

It is not their fault, those bright scraps adorning the table, that as my eye was caught so was my heart, knowing that I don't know how to tie a bowtie. And I had not much incentive to learn since the death of my son so long ago.

Truly it has been over ten years since he slipped away from us, which may not be long in the scheme of things. Yet time and ties have ways to bind, even in an innocuous aisle of an ordinary store, when we realize what we miss.

Hunter and the God

November 20th, 10:34 PM. My bed awaits.

Tonight, I came home from a dinner outing and errands, and found myself standing in the driveway holding a pie in my hands. The air was cool and crisp. I stood stock still, wondering.

Not about the pie, mind you. Apple, if you are curious, and about the size of a large hubcap. A slice will be breakfast tomorrow, perhaps with a slice of cheese.

What had me still was the sight to behold in the sky: Orion rising over the trees, facing Taurus the bull, which appeared to have Jupiter stuck in its horns. I was transfixed, wondering.

God on the horns, beset by the hunter. A metaphor writ celestial, just for me. My maternal grandmother, my G-maw, whispered in my heart. The voice of my brother lanced through my brain and I contracted around a spasm of loss, the point sharpened by the wrinkled  faces of my departed children glowing in the dim light of my mind.

Jupiter, Aldebaran and Rigel wavered briefly, little spikes of light coruscating out from them as I closed my weary eyes. The breath whooshed softly from my lungs. Two heartbeats later I opened my eyes to look back up in the sky. The stars and planet were still there shining down on me and my languid heart.

Just like them. Yes, just like them.

Petals of Silver Halide

There are fragments, shards,
emulsified drifts and stacks of paper
opalescent eyes in black/white,
smile an eclipse of the sun

Across the room, not daring to sit,
his gaze an offering of loyalty
upon an altar sacrificed,
his love ambered in silver halide

Dog Days of the Soul

I once was possessed of the notion that I was a tough guy.  Not in the sense of looking to get into fights, or crush beer cans on my forehead or any such nonsense.  I thought I was tough that I could take anything the universe could throw at me.  It was a conceit that sustained me for quite a long time in my life.  The shame of it is that it was simply not true.  The universe, as only it can, disabused me of that notion in a manner most violent, then kicked me while I was struggling to stand up.

My Big Bro has been gone two years now.  I thought of him today, and realized what it was that had been nagging me a little since mid-July.

Remembering him reminded me that, really, I'm not as tough as I like to think.

Remembering him reminds me that I am human, as was he.  Beautiful, sad, flawed but ultimately worthy of love.  

This is a gift worth far more than being a tough guy.  I remember you, my brother, and rejoice in being human.

Anniversarequiem

Sunrise as always
for millenia of an Earth
in ceaseless spinning
cosmic mirror of a heart
sore from pounding
beating, pushing thin blood
through weary veins
writing the meaning
of sorrow, of grief
on the palimpsest soul
with a story writing
and rewriting itself

Gilded children playing
in the Eden of the heart
Wondering who they would
have been had they lived,
What they would have said;
And watching that sunrise
on just another day
that means nothing to many
but everything to eyes
of the beholder, the heart
who holds them dear
and will never let them go.

---

In honor of my two children, who left this world in a summer so bright, and me in a fall hard upon a winter that began in August 2003.  The sun is out now, but my bones will never forget the meaning of cold.  It never ceases to amaze me that two creatures so small and so brief in time could teach me just about everything I needed to know about fatherhood.

Time To Grow Up: Addendum #1

Having had some time to meditate on my post of Sunday, I realize I may have left the impression that the life-altering events that shaped my transition to 'growing up' were all of a negative or traumatic nature.  While it is true that a lot of powerful and heart-breaking things did happen, it is also true that good, great things happened.  First and foremost among those was the birth of my darling Wee Lass.  There may be some close seconds, but that she came into this world is the first on the list of Great Things What Happened To Gumbo.

I bring this up because events of great joy, like those of great trauma, also take a certain level of maturity to fully process and enjoy.  It is certainly easier if it is something happy, because those happy things don't hurt.  But to fully internalize the joy, to really appreciate it, takes a certain amount experience because experience gives us a way to compare and contrast what we we feel in the present with what we have felt in the past.  It helps one to truly understand what matters.

When I was younger, nice things could happen and I could be happy along with them, but perhaps I was too casual about joy.  Because our parents worked to protect us from petty slights and from the worst the universe could serve up, sometimes it was difficult to understand that joy, like pain, is transient.  Enjoyed or endured, they pass.

Once I had the "benefit" of experience*, though, I wrapped my head around the bittersweet.  I learned to temper my joy with a memory of the pain, and vice versa.  It sounds weird; after all, who really wants to be reminded of hurt and trauma?  I was afraid of that at first.  However, as I have practiced it, I find that the joys have gotten better, and the pains easier to endure.  Things balance themselves.

Understanding that, I think, is a key component of growing up.

---

*I once told myself, in the midst of some of the worst pain I ever experienced upon the deaths of my first two children in 2003, that if knowing pain is in some guise what it means to be wise, I'd much prefer to remain a fool.  While I would never deliberately go back to a situation like for the sake of learning something, I do have a greater appreciation for what I learned.

Rain Song

The sound of silver drops caressing the leaves nearly undid me.  A mostly quiet night, resting at the little table on the porch.  I was enjoying the breeze and the scent of pansies when I noticed  the horizon turning nightshade, a "wine-dark sea" overhead.

And me without my bireme.

No matter, I was captaining a patio chair, with cookies as boon companions and rations for the trip I wanted to take.  My body stayed put, but the heart and mind were off the leash.  I closed my eyes.  I drew in a deep breath and the scent of good green things flowed into my lungs, along with the fresh scent of the rain beginning to fall to starboard of my porch rail.  The patter of water rose to my ears, the tears of Tlaloc uncoiling the spring in the pit of my stomach.


Time stopped.  In that slice of infinity, I recalled home and love, and hands the touch of which I miss.  But the rain was falling, and the good green things will grow.


They will grow.

Midnight

Midnight, silver rain
caresses silken petals,
dreaming of her hands

Sinker

Fathoms down, the pressure
and the light are alien
to you and me and ghosts,
a fade to intergalactic indigo


Breathing is no longer possible
Live while you can on the scraps,
Oxygen desaturating, starry eyed,
hands desperate to swim

But they can't, they won't,
not until fingers unclench
from around the leaden sphere
they have carried for years

The singularity in the hands
may have once been a comfort
but now is the diver's weights
on you who wish to fly

The sky is up there, waiting,
through a sheen of blue quicksilver
Just free the past from your hands,
break the surface and breathe

Spring Poetry Slam #3: Falling

Drops tickling window,
Wash the ground on which she stands
Will the flowers grow?

I Think That Was Me

Leaving from where I want to be away,

March has the jump on me, the cool breeze

and I thought it was you breathing on my cheek

Springtime and the living is crazy, not easy,

flowers pushing up through the sod

and all I can feel is your fingers on my back

Wishing they were, that sweet pressure,

laying in the gray black, dreaming, hallucinating,

and I thought it was you that I had chased

only to wake up striped with oyster light,

panting and sweating, hands clenched,

with the scrapes to prove my fall

---

Words in bold are lyrics from the song "Driveway to Driveway" by Superchunk.  A very inspiring song, and a little close to the bone...

Bookends: Eighties

Me and Big Bro, circa 1984

I was browsing some '80's and '90's music files tonight and I could not help but think of my brother.  The music led me to some pictures, specifically the one above.  It's a Polaroid, and my parents have the original.  I never used to get sentimental over old pictures, especially ones of myself, but things are different now.  As far as I'm concerned, that picture up there needs to be archived in a museum-quality case, suitable for framing.

I am struck particularly by our expressions.  Mine was showing a lot more self-assurance (youthful arrogance?) than I really possessed, and Big Bro?  Well, he was the shizznit, as that expression says it all.  He certainly could pull off the Look.  It gained in strength when he had a guitar in his hands, something I could not (and still can't) do.

I think that picture was taken at a time when I was beginning to feel I had any confidence at all of dealing with the world, out of high school and on my way to college.  It was a time I felt like I was right, even when I wasn't.  Untested youth has a way of doing that to a person.

I'm glad I didn't know then, what I know now.  I see this picture, and I cannot help but marvel at the power we didn't know we possessed.  Me and my Big Bro against the world, two saplings as yet unbent by the storms of life...the hurricane that took him down struck much too early.  The one that might take me, well, I hope its a long way off.

Until then, I'll think of him, and sink my roots deeper into the soil.

---

The following link (to myspace.com) is to a song by The Jesus and Mary Chain, that came out in 1989, which is kind of the cap on what I think of as my first (hopefully) Golden Age.  I listen, and I wish I could have sung this live with my brother on guitar.  I know he would have liked that.

Blues From A Gun

From Grace

The song said a man will rise,

a man will fall,

from the sheer face of love

like a fly on a wall

but he has no wings

only the memory thereof

from her he understood rise,

now he understands fall,

arms outstretched in blackness

fingers brush a surface he cannot see

only feel, now raspy, now smooth,

with no purchase for his heart

---

Italicized words above are lyrics from "The Fly", by U2, from the album Achtung, Baby. But you probably already knew that...

Sea Ice Somnambulism

Trudging slowly across the freeze
sunlight an argentine presence
the face barely registered for years,
this light without warmth

yet the body continued to move,
hooded eyes glass reflecting the far horizon
without seeing crevasse and divide
or soft swelling of a heavy ocean

Until that day of heaving water, frozen air,
and the faint lap of saline against the cliff
combined with rifle crack of fracturing ice
woke him up, the sea below, between his feet

A widening gap, indigo abyss to split him open
staring in disbelief, to wonder, to think,
how far from home this blue-white purgatory
in which the heart must learn to swim

Fell From The Sky

The trip home took about an hour, when it usually took a quarter of that, and you weren't on my mind when I slid the car to the curb two blocks from home.  Sumbitch freezing rain and snow generally made a mess of things, and do you know this is the first time I've ever had to abandon my car?  Ever?  Hope it doesn't get towed.  Tomorrow is going to be a bitch getting out.

Where was I?  Oh, right, "parking" the car.  I resolved that I would have to leave it, so I grabbed my briefcase and lunch bag, the telescoping ice scraper, and stepped out into the snow.  The squeak of it beneath my boots set my teeth on edge.  Nothing for it but home.

It was while walking up the hill, on the main street that intersects mine that I first thought of you.  Well, not a thought so much as a feeling, if I am being accurate.  You know what reminded me of you?  It was the streetlights, in the snow.  The glow from them seemed particularly yellow, each surrounded by a flickering ruff of snowflakes tumbling through the air.  Trudging up the street, I felt a warm surge of deja vu course through me, and I looked up into the light, and there we were, trudging down City Park Avenue that one winter where we got a lot of snow and we were both in our teens.

Do you remember that, my brother?  You with the Miami Dolphins toboggan hat, and me wearing that ski jacket.  I think it was the one that made us look like the Michelin Man after a roll through through the remains of a campfire.  Man, that jacket ended up dirty.  That's what we got for delivering newspapers while wearing it, and generally behaving like adolescent males do.  Which is to say, with vigor and boisterousness, but rarely with common sense.

But we didn't need common sense, did we, Big Bro?

That's what led us to wander out in that snowfall, you and me and Carl.  Was it Carl that was with us?  I think so.  We ambled down Johnson Avenue, over to the avenue, making snowballs and trying to hit streetlights.  We all tried to catch flakes on our tongue.  And walking down the middle of the street, because there was no traffic!  Rebels, we were!

I remember walking up to Vick Street, no real destination in mind, and on the way we looked up into the ocher sky, not really watching where we were walking.  We stopped near a streetlight, and one thing that still sticks in my mind after all these years, is standing there with you in that sodium vapor glare with back lit snowflakes cascading down before us.  I remember that quite well, brother.

That memory, those snowflakes...you came back to me tonight, as I shoveled off the walk in front of my gate.  I paused briefly to rest, and as I did my gaze wandered up to the streetlight across the road.  The shape of the light, the yellowy glare...and snow drifting down like flakes of memory from the sodium sky.

I closed my eyes, a little upwelling of liquid heat making me gasp against the cold wind.  I heard, or thought I heard, the faint squeak of footsteps behind me.  For a few precious heartbeats, I was home again and we were walking down the middle of the road, secure in the knowledge that we would catch some snow on our tongues, and that we would live forever.

And you do, my brother.  Because my heart still beats, you do.

Love Lies Bleeding

The winter garden lies in silence
upon a carpet of withered memories,
petals that once simmered crimson,
emerald lushness, crumbling, faded,
into parchment upon the wind

If the heart had known
its greatest love was destined
to be an annual,
would it have planted the seed,
to blossom, only to fade?

Icefall in the Valley Of The Kings

Longer days still have their nights
laying under sheets becoming shrouds
while little claws tick the windowpanes

Forecast said a wintry mix, treacherous morning,
but it is the night and hidden moon, imps together,
whispering doubts over a thudding heart

Semi-living pharaoh turns in his wrappings,
runs a hand through stiffening hair, to wonder,
how to stop the ice from crashing through the roof

White Bowl

Animal sounds, jawbone working
and noises echo off the plaster,
reverb for the solitary eater

Mopping the remains with bread,
uncovering a field of snowy white
tasting faintly of memories unswallowed

leaden spoon cracks the bell
shattering a porcelain heart once held
by hands that once held his own

River on Fire

Far bank quivering from heat-haze,
her profile etched on aureate air
turned to glass from a liquid inferno
flowing unchecked beneath the deck

She turns away, he groans, animal howl,
hands raised to cheeks tortured cheeks,
palms come away filled with fire that
tracks down their bodies, into the water

Tolling hearts become broken bells
and speakers for the dead, who understand
bridges burn but cannot accept tears
setting the river afire that they may not cross

I Don't Want to Do This Alone

And when that fog horn blows I will be coming home
And when the fog horn blows I want to hear it
I don't have to fear it

The wind blows hard outside, snow powder swirling around the eaves and across the porch.  There is no music tonight, a conscious decision to take a breather, let the gray matter cool off.  In the gaps between gusts, the rasp of leaves and ice strikes up the band with the tick and murmur of the radiators.  I knew this would happen, helped along by a finger of Bushmills Black Bush, and I give myself up to the music playing in my head.

And I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And magnificently we will flow into the mystic

I get it, Van.  I really do.  I mouth the words as I can remember hearing them on the radio and live by other people, and it puts another crack in the stone of my heart.  A duet needs two, and there is only me.

Lyrics from "Into the Mystic" by Van Morrison.  In case you really did not know.

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P.S.: In a nice turn of events, I was published in Indie Ink today!  Please visit and drop some love!